SRA Responses

Article excerpt

I support both your proposals. As one who has been organizing and writing on the Love Economy, the social and environmental costs of GNP-measured economic growth and the need for new scorecards (such as my Country Futures Indicators [CFI], soon to be released for the U.S.A. as the Calvert-Henderson Quality-ofLife Indicators), I applaud your efforts.

The Social Responsibility Amendment to the Constitution can help create a much needed debate on corporate charters and why they need updating from their historic focus on maximizing investors' and stockholders' returns. Today, most corporate managers acknowledge that, in reality, they must attempt to optimize the corporation's performance to include other stakeholders: customers, employees, suppliers and other business partners, neighboring communities and the general public, as well as the environment. This is the result of today's communications and the rise of civic society activism worldwide and the movements for corporate accountability, as well as the "creative ten percent" of socially-concerned investors and entrepreneurs-many of them women whose enterprises now employ more American workers than all the Fortune 500 companies together.

Such updating of corporate charters can also be achieved at the state level-as Kansas pioneered in 1910, when it passed the "Blue Sky Laws" which finally curbed abuses by companies and Wall Street's freewheeling frauds on small investors. Two years later, 23 other states had passed similar laws. Such a phenomenon is discounted in market economics, which focuses on competitive behavior, and therefore, would expect a "virtuous cycle," where instead states would "race to the bottom. …